Category Archives: Financial

In this past week, I closed both my Mint and Personal Capital accounts. I had thought of keeping those accounts, but a few annoyances pushed me over the edge. Personal Capital You can’t hide an account that is now “closed”. If you delete that account, you lose all of its history. This meant I had […]

A funny thing has happened since we paid off our last car and a credit card with some medical bills on it: personal finances has gotten a bit boring. Actually, this has been a trend for awhile, but it’s gotten much more evident in these past couple of weeks. With YNAB, I’m always budgeted a […]

My wife and I are now car debt free for the first time in 5.5 years, with the final payment for her car happening a couple of days ago. If all goes to plan, this will be the last time we ever have car loan.

Looking back, I’m certain that I will view as 2014 the banner year for my personal finances, after years of half hearted attempts at paying off debt and trying to figure out how to save for retirement properly. What did I do differently this year from years past? The Early Years The education system here in the […]

With You Need A Budget (YNAB), you can import a QFX or OFX file from your bank to help reconcile your transactions. However if you are like me, you probably now have a bunch of stray QFX or OFX files hanging around in your download folder. After this list reached 50 files recently, it made […]

A couple of days ago I canceled our local newspaper that we had delivered every Sunday, saving $9.30 a month ($111.60 a year). I won’t rehash the well documented decline of the newspaper industry, but these were the reasons why I canceled: We never read the physical version of the newspaper. We always read online. The […]

The other day I read a post on Katie Floyd’s blog about Verizon Wireless offering a new single line $60/month plan who’s features (unlimited talk and text plus 2 GB of data) were the exact same as my wife’s $90 cell phone plan. Today I did a brief phone call to Verizon and within 5 […]

One of the major benefits of You Need A Budget (YNAB) is that it removed the worry from me of automating all of my bill payments. Now every bill is either automatically scheduled via my Credit Union’s bill pay, automatically billed to a credit card, or an Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) via ACH out of my checking […]

I’ve developed a method of tracking those quarterly/yearly bills that don’t neatly fit into You Need A Budget’s focus on monthly scheduling. It’s really simple. As you can see in the above screenshot, I list each of these quarterly/yearly bills in YNAB. In their title, I put when they come do (Yr for Year, Q […]

I just performed my first Credit Card payment with 100% of the transactions entered into You Need A Budget and accounted for in the budget. It was another “a ha” moment for me. No longer am I playing around with credit card float to ensure I have money in the checking account to pay it […]